I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past lately. As I get my parents’ house ready for sale, I’ve been looking at decades of memorabilia. A dozen or so boxes of my own memories lived in the attic, and the above picture is one of them: a list of things that surprised me when I visited the U.S. from Japan.
Things that surprised me:
- bathroom stall doors are high
- hot water in public bathrooms
- drinking fountains
- squirrel!
- .com billboards
- shoes in the house
- speaking volume (sound level + amount)
- professor didn’t apologize for his locked truck
This list is a time capsule from the dot-com boom. I read it today and I remember riding into Chicago from the airport at night, seeing billboard after billboard for companies that hadn’t existed a few years before, hearing “…Baby One More Time” for the first time on my friend’s car radio, and feeling very jetlagged and confused.
And it’s a time capsule of me. My late-90s handwriting. And my late-90s ability to write in Japanese. I like how I wrote the observation about the professor’s truck in Japanese, then crossed it out and rewrote it in English. I don’t remember what happened, but I can imagine the zing of culture shock when someone caused a mild inconvenience, then failed to apologize for it profusely.
I like how much you can extrapolate about my life in Japan from this list. About apologies, and shoes, and particularly about public restrooms, which had cold water only, were mostly squat toilets (so you really needed the door to go all the way down to the floor), and were not associated with drinking fountains.
What I love the most about this is, I assume, why I wrote the list: the memory of that reverse culture shock. That feeling where you’ve been gone long enough that you come back and think, oh my goodness, I forgot we do it like that! Home is so weird!
I can’t remember when I last had that feeling. It might be time for me to get out of the country again. If you’re immersed enough and pay attention enough, you realize that people have completely different ways of doing things – the little things and the big things – that your way is not the only way, and that it’s a wonderful, weird, wild, wide world.
Photo: Helen Fields, obviously
